Catalyst: The ultimate strategies on how to win at work and in life

by Chandramouli Venkatesan

foundation.

To truly succeed in your career, you need to win when it matters, which is the second half. Most people win in the first half, very few in the second. However, success in the second half does not happen based on what you do in the second

half. It has to be catalysed by the foundation-building you do in the first. Foundation-building in the first half is easier said than done. There are three key barriers people have to overcome to do the foundation-building: Inability to delay gratification. The pressure of winning the rat race. Lack of knowledge and suitable guidance on how to do foundation-building.

if you are in a major learning cycle, it also, in all probability, means that you are doing something very important and critical for the business. It is highly unlikely that you are in a major learning cycle doing something that is unimportant to the business.

This could be in front-line sales facing customers, in factories or in highly transaction-intensive operational roles. This could mean spending time in challenging locations that are not idyllic to live in. Much like how you can’t become an effective general leading an army if you don’t have an understanding of what happens in the trenches, you can’t become an effective senior leader if you don’t understand the nuts and bolts of how business happens.

Foundation-building in the first half is the catalyst for success in the second half. To make the right career choices in the first half, take decisions that maximize real individual growth rather than short-term career success. Focusing on career choices that favour depth over width is important for foundation-building.

building. Depth drives skill-building, which is more important for the experience algorithm in the longer term. Length in roles also allows you to learn how to get to high-hanging fruit, which is important for success in the second half. There will be many learning cycles that you will experience in your career. However, out of these many, there would be only 4–5 major learning cycles. These will be the career-defining ones. It is important to know when you are in one of them. Always take decisions that allow you to complete a major learning cycle; never leave one incomplete. Get out there when you can. It is important to learn the nuts and bolts of business early in your career.

The first type of boss is one who is focused on getting results out of his or her subordinates. Their primary orientation is to get the job done, and so they follow up, support and drive you to get results. The second type of boss is one who is equally committed to delivering results, but does that so that you not only deliver results but also learn and build your experience algorithm

better while doing so. This person prioritizes results, but also focuses on asking you questions in a way that makes you reflect, pushes you to get to the solutions yourself rather than giving you the answers at the first chance and has a review process that not only focuses on the delivery of the task/result but also on driving learning for you.

As it is said, there are only two things you can’t choose in your life—your parents and your bosses.

The first indicator is the company’s standing in the talent market. If it has a reputation for hiring high-quality talent, then it has a higher probability of having more good bosses. The other indicator is the importance the company places on the development of its people.

three things you can do to improve the probability of getting a good boss in your foundational years. These are—being a

good subordinate, working in companies that have a higher percentage of good bosses and hanging on to good bosses when you find them.

External stakeholders like your bosses and mentors are tremendous catalysts for real individual growth and long-term career success. There are three things you can do, that are in your influence, to improve the chance that you get a good boss—being a good subordinate, working in companies which have a higher percentage of good bosses and hanging on to good bosses when you find them. Mentors are critical to ensuring that you make the right career decisions in an increasingly VUCA-filled business and career world. Finding the right mentor is important, and when you find the right one, cultivating your relationship with them over time is critical.

I believe there are only two credible reasons that can allow you to take the ‘quit’ decision—learning and fit. If at some stage, you feel you are no longer learning and your algorithm is not building up, and you are sure that it is because of the organization and not because of you, then you can consider quitting your current organization. The second aspect is ‘fit’. When you feel your values and culture no longer match those of the organization and you are fundamentally a misfit in your current organization, that is the time to quit.

When people first make the decision to quit and then find the reasons to justify and rationalize it, what tends to happen is that they actually see only two quadrants properly. Those two quadrants are ‘My current organization—What is bad’ and ‘My future organization—What can be good’. In many ways, this is a symptom of a superficial, poorly made decision—when only two quadrants have been thought about by the decision-maker.

Career decisions, including the decision to change companies, are among the most important decisions you will take and usually impact how successful you are in your career. The right decisions will maximize real individual growth and the wrong decisions will curtail it. In that context, I do believe long stints in the same company are highly beneficial to the

experience algorithm-building because the experience curve moves from being a linear curve to an exponential curve in long stints. The decision to quit your current organization and the decision to join a new one are two different decisions. They are best made independent of each other. Ideally, the decision to quit must be made even before you start to explore and consider outside opportunities. The decision to quit your current organization should be driven by the fundamental reasons of learning and fit. Learning is about saying your experience algorithm growth has slowed down and fit is about values and culture. Other reasons like pay, designation and negative triggers like a temporary bad phase should have a lower weightage in the quit decision. The four quadrant technique is a good way of evaluating if you have made a sound decision or if you have made the decision first and then found reasons to justify it.

For the join decision, evaluating prospective learning and fit in the new company is more important than pay and other prospects. Will the new place accelerate your real individual growth? Will the new place have a culture and valu...

Converting time into experience is the very bedrock of real individual growth. An effective TMRR model is the key to converting the time you are spending at work into an experience algorithm that will drive your success in the future. Applying the TMRR algorithm on major learning cycles is an exponential way to drive real individual growth.

Just building the experience algorithm is not enough; you have to, in parallel, increase your productivity. Productivity is the means through which you can convert the experience algorithm into results. The key to growing productivity is to focus on the circle of influence and to make sure you allocate your time to the rocks. However, fantastic real individual growth has to be backed by good career management decisions and approach. The key to that is to make career decisions based on what drives real individual growth. In Part II, we covered what the key principles to this end are: In careers, win when it matters—which is the second half. It is possible to win in the second half only if you do foundation-building and drive real individual growth in the first half. To do foundation-building in the first half, make career choices that focus on depth over width, ensure completion of major learning

cycles and get out there when you can. Getting good bosses is crucial to foundation-building, and mentors are crucial in making the right decisions in the VUCA world of careers and business. Long stints in one company can have a positive and exponential impact on building your experience algorithm. The decisions to quit your current company and join elsewhere are crucial and must be done right. To get them right, focus on separating the quit decision from the join decision. The quit decision must be based on the absence of learning and fit in your current w...

Striving sports are very different from recreational sports. If you were to visualize a billiards table in a very cool room with a glass of wine in your hand, you would get the picture of a recreational sport. You don’t run a marathon for recreation or pleasure; it is a striving sport, even though you might feel good at the end of it.

Most of us know Maslow’s hierarchy, which explains the motivations of our life in a classic pyramid (figure reproduced below): Maslow’s hierarchy attempts to explain our motivations in life.

This pyramid explains what motivates us at work and in our careers. At the base of the pyramid is our need for achievement, our need to achieve material success and wealth, our need to achieve comfortable living standards for ourselves and for our families, our need to achieve respect and recognition, etc. A large portion of our careers is spent meeting our achievement need. The next level of motivation is mastery. This is our need for being the master of our trade, for the ability to say that what we do has our personal stamp of quality, a sense of representing a high standard of excellence in what we do, and for being a reference standard to the world in our area of work. The last and final motivation at the top of the pyramid is purpose. We are highly motivated by a sense of purpose at work that goes beyond our own achievements and mastery. This is about the ‘why’ of work, which is beyond our personal needs—the sense of having a cause, a vision, a purpose. The combination of achievement, mastery and purpose represents the motivations that drive us at work and in our careers.

My dear readers, this change in me came about by sheer providence. However, for each one of you, there is an opportunity to actively catalyse this change to become a more effective leader. And the secret to that is to develop a ‘passionate striving’ hobby in life, one that gives you a sense of achievement and broadens your source of achievement beyond work. It should be a hobby in which you strive for achievement and one that liberates you from feeding the achievement need at work, and hence lets you graduate to mastery and purpose.

So to summarize, evaluate your hobby on these two criteria: Is there a degree of striving involved? Does it help meet your achievement need?

Motivations at work is defined by the pyramid comprising achievement, mastery and purpose. The key to succeeding at leadership is to operate at mastery and purpose at work and not be driven only by your need for achievement. To operate at mastery and purpose you have to find a way of meeting your achievement need outside work. A ‘passionate striving’ hobby is the means to that. It is important to be passionate about your hobby as otherwise you would not be able to sustain the striving for a long time.

I like to measure leadership based on two metrics—followership and influence.

Leadership = Function (Position and Content)

Leadership = Function (Position, Content,

Values)

A 50 per cent difference in content can cause some difference in leadership, but even 10 per cent less in values can create a much bigger swing in leadership.

Leadership = (Position + Content) × Values

It was clear to me that position and content were the raw materials for creating leadership impact. If there is no content, even the highest values don’t create leadership. Such a person would be liked a lot, but would not have influence and would not be followed. Equally, position does play a role. A very junior person will find it difficult to create followership on a large scale, albeit junior folks with good content do generate significant influence. So position and content go hand-in-hand. But the explosive conversion of that raw material into the finished product of leadership is driven by values, and that is why I saw it as a multiplicative equation for values. For a given position and content, the extent of leadership difference that values can create is staggering.

I measure leadership by the extent of followership and influence.

I am sure by now you are saying, yes, I understand that leadership is all about the followership and influence you can create and yes, I understand that values are the multiplicative factor.

There are many values—honesty/integrity, simplicity, humility, authenticity . . . the list could go on.

and humility—as my lodestar values.

‘You are not as good as your best success; you are not as bad as your worst failure.’

If you are humble, you know that no success is ever created by you alone; there are other people involved, there are circumstances that contributed to your success, and so on. Humility allows you to enjoy the success without letting it affect you, without it creating arrogance in you. Equally, the grounded nature of a humble person is what also allows him or her to deal with failure when it happens. If you are humble, your ability to stay grounded through cycles of success and failure is much higher, and your ability to sustain long-term success is much higher as well.

My learning is that there are three stages to values improvement: The first stage is sensitivity—facing what you are doing well in that value and what you are doing poorly. Creating self-awareness of how you fare at the lodestar standard of that value is the very starting point of improving it. The second stage is practice—forcing yourself to practise the right values behaviour. Choosing a few clear practice areas and being extremely disciplined in practising these will help build the consciousness of the lodestar standard in you. The third stage is embedding it into the person you are—the stage where the practice no longer requires conscious effort but gets integrated into who you are.

The bulk of the corporate culture on values is to restrict the occurrence of a breach. I, however, believe there is an upside to superior values for long-term success. For that, it is essential to change the coding of your understanding on values, from one that says limit the downside to one that says leverage the upside. The upside of catalysing values comes from the higher leadership impact that superior values can create. Leadership impact is measured by the followership and influence that you have. Leadership impact as per the VML equation is driven by position and content and, most importantly, values, which have a multiplicative impact on leadership. The values I believed in were the twin Hs, honesty and humility. The key to honesty is to reach the level of pristine honesty, which means you focus on doing right even when others are doing wrong and getting away with it. Humility is about staying grounded through cycles of success and failure, knowing that you alone are not the reason for your success. Leadership impact based on superior values allows you to drive transformational change based on strong followership. It is transformational change that is the sign of a legacy-creating leader, and allows you to create long-term success for yourself. Superior values have to be catalysed through an improvement plan. Just living your life every day does not improve your values; you have to work towards improving them. Remember, great success requires you to drive great chan...